An ingenious juxtaposition.
Economics may sound dull, but this is mostly about war.
Journalist and broadcaster Weldon, author of Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through: The Surprising Story of Britain’s Economy From Boom to Bust and Back Again, emphasizes that economics explains human behavior well beyond simple money and trade. He writes that the first states were built by “violence specialists.” After the agricultural revolution some humans realized that farming was hard work and stealing from farmers was easier. This is Weldon’s introduction to Vikings, who took robbery to a new level. European nations sometimes fought them off; others paid them off. This sounds cowardly but turned out to be a good tactic. Flush with wealth, Vikings lost interest in returning to impoverished Scandinavia, where there was little to buy, and spent it on the spot, settling and eventually ruling many areas in Europe, England included. The ultimate violence specialists were Mongols, nomads from the Eurasian Steppe, who, under Genghis Khan, conquered an empire so large that he can be considered the father of globalization. Readers will quickly learn that this is not a seamless account, but 17 isolated yet delightful chapters recount signal events in war economics down to the present day. Again and again, sensible decisions were no such thing, and irrational policies succeeded. Having defeated France in the Seven Years War, Britain had a choice between acquiring Canada or the rich, tiny French Caribbean sugar island: Guadeloupe. It chose Canada, which turned out disastrously. Everyone praises Russian Premiere Khrushchev for ending Stalin’s murderous paranoia, but staying alive was one of few motivations in the clunky peacetime Soviet economy, where patronage networks and corruption soon thrived. Many chapters are only distantly related to economics but no less entertaining. The Luftwaffe showered medals and publicity on successful fighter pilots, but it turns out that fighter pilots are already fiercely competitive, and these rewards encouraged excessive, often suicidal, risk-taking.
An ingenious juxtaposition.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9798897100309
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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